


No Tomorrow

by TwilightDeviant



Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-05
Updated: 2019-03-15
Packaged: 2019-11-12 11:20:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18009962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TwilightDeviant/pseuds/TwilightDeviant
Summary: Tommy Shelby has a clock in his arm, telling him the precise second he will meet his soulmate. And until it arrives, he’s untouchable.





	1. War

There was a clock.  
  
Its numbers counted down, one second at a time, then a minute, hour, days, years. Time dwindled through him like an hourglass, always slipping away, always anticipating an end, a purpose. Tommy’s soulmate waited for him at zero.  
  
Every person had a clock, embedded under skin like a tattoo, shifting like unwholesome magic. Every clock had its intent, and please God, let that be the meeting of another soul.  
  
Some unlucky bastards found their end before they found love. Clocks reflected their misfortune, ticking to an hour of death which some might mistake as their lucky day. Children with a five-year-bid had mothers who prayed for puppy love. The Shelby family knew that dread well with their young Ada, but no. No, it was not death for her, only Freddie Thorne, a child himself. Both families exhaled their relief over that one.  
  
Tommy was not so early, nor was he punctual by the standard of many, but thirty-two was a fairer age than some. He only resented the stretching hour once: when it told him, no, Greta Jurossi was not his soulmate, though he was hers. Dark omen came with that— and dark fulfillment after. Tommy outlived her.  
  
On the heel of personal tragedy, the world went to Hell. Tommy Shelby and his clock went to war.  
  
They were godforsaken, horrific days, full of nightmares, and waking did not end them. Dirt stayed in his lungs, fear in his heart, and death in the air. No man kept his morale or his innocence long. Amidst the gunfire and the shelling, Tommy was little better than the rest. But he always had that secret weapon, and he never kept it to himself in those times of deepest despair.  
  
“Don’t you worry, lads,” Tommy comforted. He grabbed the cuff of his coat and took it up his forearm. “What does that say, eh? What’s it say?”  
  
He put his arm in Freddie’s face and made him read the row of numbers. “Six years,” the man stated, but Tommy made him go over each number after it, until every single second sunk in. “But Tommy—”  
  
“No.” He would not hear it. Tommy had his promise of longevity, but he knew Freddie’s finished and faded clock made him afraid. His friend was mortal man with all its insecurities. “What this is to me... is a contract,” Tommy asserted, “granting me, in no uncertain terms, that I am promised _every fucking minute_  until the bloody thing is spent. I am not dying here in France. No. Not when there’s a girl waiting for me in Birmingham. You’re all welcome to live by my side, if you choose.”  
  
Freddie tried his hardest to believe. Sometimes, he asked to see Tommy’s clock. He needed to know nothing was changed. He needed to witness its consistent count to a living future far away.  
  
There were days when the noose seemed closer, nights when their necks felt the coarse rope tightening and scratching. More than once, Freddie asked to watch Tommy’s clock as he fell asleep. Rest was difficult when knowing you could be bombed in slumber, wake up in Hell with not a moment spent expiring. Sleep, if possible, was terrifying. A man needed to know he was dying.  
  
Tommy had patience and understanding for his friend. He shared his temporal comfort with him.  
  
“It’s all right, Freddie. It’s all right. Here we are.” Tommy laid behind Freddie and put his arm over him, letting it rest on the man’s side and come around his front. Freddie could see the clock as much as he needed, and they could both catch their sleep. “It’s all right.”  
  
Tommy was not going to die. The man sleeping in his arms was safe. He was safe with him.  
  
Freddie was a brave man to go through the war without Tommy’s insurance policy— or Arthur’s or John’s. Freddie, Danny, and Jeremiah went to France with a love in their heart but no numbers on their arm.  
  
“Stay close to the Shelby boys,” men’s minds told them, rationalized to them. “They got years on ‘em.” To be the shadow of a deathless man was to feel no small amount of secondhand security.  
  
Freddie took a bullet for the cleverness of proximity. It saved Tommy’s life. He survived it, thankfully, but second thought was put into orbiting the Shelbys. Perhaps they lived because men died in their places.  
  
Tommy did not ask for the sacrifice of others, only that his clock never lie to him. For the longest time, it stayed true. But there came a night when he lost his faith. It bled from him like men’s guts hanging out of them on the battlefield. In the bleak midwinter, there was no hope. There was no guarantee. There was no lover at the end. There was a troop of Prussian cavalrymen coming for them in the morning. There was only death, Death and the cold metal shoes upon which its pale horse rode.  
  
Tommy watched his somatic clock the whole night long, its numbers reflected in the dim lantern light. He swore he heard it ticking.  
  
Tick.  
  
Tick.  
  
Tick.  
  
He waited to denounce the clock and its cruel joke. It gave him fool’s hope in a hopeless desolation. There was no way some preordained mark could account for The Great War.  
  
There was no way.  
  
He waited for it, the end.  
  
But his cowering little company was spared. The enemy never came. They survived the night, and the next day, and the war. Tommy’s clock was a contract, as he arrogantly claimed, only now he had proof. War could not bury him in a ditch. Rival gangs could not claim his head.  
  
For the next four years, Tommy Shelby became an immortal. The clock was one of his greatest assets, kept up his sleeve like a fifth ace, something he knew that his enemies did not. It was advantageous to his plans.  
  
Tommy had aspirations.


	2. In Peace

With a week left on his clock, Tommy was attacked. Sabini’s men beat him brutally. The ensuing threats of death seemed credible, and yet he waited for his last-minute salvation, his _deus ex machina_. He would not die. He had a week left.  
  
Campbell was not his first choice (or second or third), but Fate always had some ideas of its own to exhibit.  
  
Tommy needed a few weeks recovering in the hospital, at least, but to Hell with that. His clock was counting down, and unless it was death for him, he would not find its fulfillment in a hospital bed. It would not end like that. He refused.  
  
The broken and breaking man limped his way to the docks.  
  
If he was going to survive the war with Sabini, he needed an ally. He needed passage to London so that he might answer a summons and break some bread.  
  
“If I sleep all the way,” he told Curly, “it’s Camden Town we’re heading for.”  
  
“What business have you in Camden Town, Tommy?” Charlie asked. He was ignored.  
  
“Tell Polly she’s in charge while I’m away,” Tommy instructed. “If I don’t come back... tell her she’s in charge for good.”  
  
He had his boat to London. He had four days on his clock. He rode to its end. Which end that was, he had no idea. In four days, Tommy Shelby would find love, or he would find his death. He left Birmingham with no guarantee he would see his city again.  
  
For the first time in his life, Tommy did not have the guarantee. It felt like falling, and there was no telling what was at the bottom of the pit. He did not know.  
  
He did not know, but it was coming.  
  
Tommy fell onto his pallet with a groan. The injuries from Sabini’s beating took their toll. That first night, all he did was sleep. It was one of his final promised days, and he missed it completely. He missed most of his voyage. Consciousness ebbed and rebounded like the gentle river waves rocking up against them.  
  
In the low light of a boat’s hull, Tommy Shelby watched his clock run down. He drifted between that recurrent sleep and pain, and every time there was pain, more hours were gone. He watched it those four days. He witnessed unavoidable love come to claim him. He experienced procrastinated mortality come to meet him.  
  
They were a long four days.  
  
They were brief.  
  
His soulmate was in London. Already, the person was an inconvenience.  
  
On the last full day, Tommy could no longer tolerate lying around. He dragged himself on deck and told Curly he would take over steering. It felt good to control something.  
  
Control.  
  
After tomorrow, Tommy would be no better than Freddie Thorne, cowering at the bottom of a hole with no idea what fate might befall him— or when.  
  
That tomorrow came too soon. Camden Town came quicker. They docked their boat, and Curly tied them up.  
  
Tommy looked at his clock one last time before pulling down his sleeve, putting on his jacket, and disembarking.  
  
“Sixteen minutes and thirty-seven seconds,” the clock read, four relevant integers following a line of irrelevant zeroes. That time was in the past. All that mattered were the 997 seconds ahead of him.  
  
Tommy counted each one in his head. He never lost his place, not through introductions at the door, not through assurances he would be led to Alfie Solomons.  
  
There was no time for alternative outcomes, and Tommy accepted that either his soulmate or his death was in the warehouse. He did not divert from his chosen schedule for the day. There was no point in such futile and cowardly actions. The clock knew what was due him, and he knew it was unavoidable.  
  
Tommy did not lose his count as a man at the final door impeded him. No, instead, the numbers screamed in his head.  
  
Seven.  
  
Six.  
  
Five.  
  
“Put him down, Ollie. Put him down, mate. He’s only little.”  
  
One.  
  
Tommy’s heart skipped a beat, alerting him that it was finished. It was done. He was called to fate as bells at church summoned their parishioners.  
  
So it was love after all. It certainly beat death, if he had to choose one.  
  
From several yards away, Tommy’s soulmate approached. It was a man, unmistakably a man— a masculine one with a full beard and wide, stomping gait. There was authority in him. He ran the operation.  
  
Tommy’s soulmate was none other than Alfie Solomons himself.  
  
He put a cigarette in his mouth as they closed divisive distance and inspected one another. He could not tell if Alfie approved of him or not.  
  
“You on your own?” the man asked.  
  
Tommy looked about himself at empty air. “Seems so.” He brought no backup, no interlopers. If Alfie dismissed his own, they could have a proper conversation.  
  
“Well, you’re a brave lad, ain’t ya?” The off-handed remark implied a decent first impression. “You wanna take a look at my bakery?”  
  
Alfie walked him through the warehouse and past the barrels of his distillation.  
  
They were professionals, Tommy and Alfie, men who kept the most intimate matters to themselves and for as long as possible. Therefore, they did not speak a word outside of business until within the four secluding walls of the man’s office.  
  
“All right then.” Alfie raised the wick of an oil lamp, brightening their immediate space. “Let’s get a better look at you.”  
  
Tommy stood perfectly still as he was assessed.  
  
“Yeah... mm-hm,” Alfie murmured to himself. He stroked his beard as he looked his soulmate over, shuffling around him, examining the back along with the front. He lingered in both areas but concluded on the face. “I bet... you are fuckin’ gorgeous when you haven’t been beat all to shit.”  
  
“That does seem to be the prevailing opinion,” Tommy returned.  
  
Alfie inhaled as he considered the short reply and the absent reciprocation of his very generous flattery. “Does my prevalence of cock and lacking breasts disappoint you, Mr. Shelby?”  
  
Tommy looked him in the eye instead of aforementioned attributes. “I harbored no expectations.”  
  
Alfie laughed at him. “What a right fucking liar you are, mate.” He traveled the room and sat behind his desk. “I won’t be— Oh, have a sit, won’t ya?” Tommy took the seat across from him. “Right, well, I won’t be apologizin’ for not being a woman for you, first off.”  
  
“Understandable,” Tommy pardoned. Given the man’s behavior, he had to wonder if Alfie’s own preference was met. “But that isn’t to say,” Tommy imparted, “that I am exclusively dissatisfied by our outcome, nor that such an apology, had it been forthcoming, would have been entirely necessary.”  
  
Alfie spent a few seconds deciphering the words and grinned at their end. Tommy had his preference, yes, but most aspects of his life did allow for some degree of flexibility.  
  
“You won’t offer apology,” Tommy said. “Shall I offer congratulations, Mr. Solomons?” Same sex soulmates were not especially common, but they did happen. And the church begrudgingly looked the other way for them. Otherwise, they questioned the will of God Himself and His intent behind the clock in every arm.  
  
“Oh, that’s very considerate, yeah. That’s very considerate. Thank you, precious. Thank you. Congratulations accepted.” Alfie rolled his sleeves up around the elbow to make himself more comfortable. If he previously felt need to hide his clock from prying eyes, the concern was rendered moot by their meeting. “That’s fucking useless now, innit?” He saw Tommy looking at his arm. Recently black numbers slowly faded into gray and into skin.  
  
“Did you use it?” Tommy questioned.  
  
“Yes.” Alfie’s eyes saw past Tommy. They saw through wall and over sea, all the way to France itself. “When you’re in the shit... trenches and the gas— or the... When you’ve got this fucking mad Italian comin’ at ya... And you know it’s him or you. He knows it’s you or him. When that’s coming... you are thankful, my darling, thankful... that God has told you... ‘Not yet, son... Not yet.’” He blinked away his long stare. “You know I went and carried out my own personal form of stigmata on that Italian. I pushed his face up against the trench and shoved a six-inch nail up his fucking nose, and I hammered it home with a duckboard. It was fucking Biblical, mate.”  
  
If Alfie endeavored to impress him, innovative violence was only part of the equation.  
  
“That war was a long time ago.”  
  
“But you did use your clock for it, right?” Alfie assumed. “You did, yeah. That’s why you asked.”  
  
“I did, yes,” Tommy confirmed. “It carried me through many a dark day.” There was a certain romanticism Tommy could have voiced, saying it was Alfie who helped him through.  
  
He said nothing.  
  
Alfie appeared to see into him and know Tommy’s true opinion, one shared. They did not carry one another through the war. They were not waiting for their soulmate, were not pulled through by fond anticipation. They reveled in the time before it. They exploited every moment until the other man was met, every second of immunity from death. Alfie saw that in Tommy, and he agreed.  
  
“We’re a pair, ain’t we?”  
  
“That’s what I’m told.”  
  
“Bit funny, innit?” Alfie remarked. “How many years I been hearin’ your name and you been hearin’ mine. Probably never thought to yourself, ‘I bet that Jewish bastard’s the one I’m bound for,’ did ya?”  
  
“No,” Tommy answered. The thought never crossed his mind, not even on his long trip downriver towards the man.  
  
“Well,” he said, “I’ve heard very bad, bad, bad things about you Birmingham people.” He clicked his tongue. “You’re gypsies, right? Fancy the two of us, Jew and a gypsy, paragons of the oppression, liftin’ ourselves out the mud and the shit, making something of ourselves, yeah.” Alfie thought out loud as he came to a conclusion alongside Tommy. Yes, they were rather similar, and no, their summons was not without merit. Mistakes did not happen, and if they sought to condemn God’s choice of partner, it was not a debate blessed with longevity. They knew that fact, even if they chose the long way towards acceptance. “Fancy that.”  
  
Alfie was his soulmate. He was Alfie’s.  
  
Tommy retrieved the box from his pocket, quite in need of another cigarette. He struck a match, and that first inhale helped settle his unsettled disposition.  
  
Alfie rested his folded hands atop the desk, partaking in no vice as he attempted his own journey towards acceptance, towards scrutinizing what Fate saw fit to get him into. “So what you live in,” he asked, “a fucking tent or a caravan?”  
  
“Is that what you really want to discuss,” Tommy replied, “my living arrangements?” He let his eyes flit across the dank grandeur of Alfie’s bakery. “Afraid I’ll ferry you away from all of this, relocate you over a cold ground and under a leaking tent?”  
  
“Oh, course not, no, course not. My back, see, it’d never go in for that.” He made a pageant of placing his hand to an old man’s back, and Tommy had to wonder how much was an act.  
  
Living together, Tommy pondered, was a step too far, met too fast. Domesticity in any form was not a topic he was prepared to broach, even jokingly.  
  
“I came here to discuss business with you, Mr. Solomons.”  
  
“Well—” Alfie clapped his hands together with a loud singular smack— “rum is for fun and fucking, innit?” While theoretical inevitability dictated the occasion was to come, it was not yet upon them or their nearest future. “Whiskey, now that, that is for business.” He opened his desk drawer and grabbed the bottle, but a word from Tommy stopped him going any further.  
  
“That is why I came here,” he reiterated. The intent behind his visit, however, was drastically altered by their consequential meeting and transfigured relationship, remaking whatever they could have had, even if in the slightest ways. “Mr. Solomons,” Tommy reflected, “I wager our... situation will do nothing but make fools of two intelligent men.”  
  
“You,” Alfie replied, “are not wrong.”  
  
For one another, they would demonstrate foolish choices. They would be blind to obvious observations.  
  
“Regrettable then,” Tommy said. “The last thing that you and I should do—” he took a drag of his cigarette— “is enter into business together.” He was rightfully cautious. Tommy needed the partnership between their organizations for his expansion; however, he did not ignore the ways Alfie could take full advantage of him, and he might not see warning signs until that final moment.  
  
“Fucking hell, you put the carriage before the horse, don’t ya, boy?” He scoffed at Tommy, mocking his rush and his assumptions. “You think a telegram is a contract? Is that what you think?”  
  
“That is why you sent it, eh?” Tommy asserted. “If not a contract, then a proposition.” He did not miss Alfie’s unwavering study of his lips as they puckered around his cigarette and inhaled. “You’re losing the war with Sabini.” Alfie’s cheek twitched and his jaw clenched. He fell short in war and business, and it was his own soulmate slinging the accusation of inadequacy at him. “‘Those of you who are last, will soon be first.’ That is what I said to you in Sabini’s club. That is what I promised. You responded.”  
  
Alfie stroked the hair on his chin. “That was to me, eh?”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“You,” he pointed, “were talking to me?”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“No, see,” Alfie corrected, “you didn’t say not one fucking word to me, mate. You said this to him, who said that to her, who repeated it to one of my boys, who whispered it right here, right into my fucking ear. Yeah? So you didn’t say anything to me. You want to talk to me, Mr. Shelby, you talk to me. You want to sell me something, make the pitch, sweetheart. And then fuck off. This whole situation is already more business than I’d’ve liked it.”  
  
Tommy understood. He never imagined a business partner for a soulmate. The closest he ever came was the creation of a docile wife who knew what he did and prudently turned her gaze.  
  
“I want to hear you talk your business,” Alfie insisted. “So you do that now, and I... I’ll listen.”  
  
“I talk, you listen.”  
  
“I’ll have you know,” he boasted, “I am a fucking fantastic listener. And I hear that you, well, you’re not too bad a talker, are you?”  
  
“You’re not so bad yourself,” Tommy complimented. The man liked to talk and there was no mistake. He seemed to go for quantity of words over quality, however, and in that respect, they did differ. That was not to say Tommy did not enjoy listening to the long slew of it.  
  
“On you go then.”  
  
“All right.” The cigarette simmered idly between his fingers. “Your distillery provides one-tenth of your income,” Tommy said, letting Alfie know that, though the day marked their first meeting, he knew him. He knew all about him and his organization. “Protection is another 10%, and the rest you make from the race tracks.”  
  
A metal handle clinked in Alfie’s hand as he entertained the drawer of his desk. He did not like hearing Tommy’s little speech.  
  
“You need to be realistic.”  
  
Alfie glared at him. “Speak.”  
  
“We join forces,” Tommy proposed, taking the long way and a part-time job as the Devil’s advocate before saying it. He did not want to partner with a man destined to make him weak, but he did need to. They both needed it, the alliance.  
  
“Fuck off.” Alfie saw it was nothing but a joke, an unfunny one. “I won’t give up power,” he refused, and that was how he saw partnership. They were prideful bastards incapable of giving away that for which they worked. Their worlds were all or nothing.  
  
“I know what I’m saying makes you angry,” Tommy said, “but I’m offering you a solution. I know Mr. Sabini is running all your bookies off your courses. And he is closing down the premises that take your rum. And people don’t trust your protection anymore.” Tommy might have pitied the unfortunate circumstances of his soulmate— if either of them could live down the sentiment. It was all the more reason Tommy wanted Alfie’s success. No soulmate of his would lose. He could not allow the insult. “But you don’t want... our mutual solution, do you?” Alfie did not answer. He stared down each path of the fork in his road, considering which choice was the better of two evils. “So good luck in your war, Mr. Solomons,” he wished. “Know that my hat is sincerely in your corner.”  
  
“Sabini will crush you,” Alfie stated. He knew the Italian already made a good attempt at it before being interrupted by the police. Sabini would not stop until he was beaten or Tommy was dead, and Tommy was not alone in that savage dilemma. No, his soulmate was on the other side of Sabini’s war on two fronts.  
  
“And he will triumph over Camden Town,” Tommy replied. Had he accepted the whiskey, he would raise it in a toast to their mutual and inevitable demise.  
  
“A war ain’t over ‘til it’s over, mate,” Alfie told him.  
  
“Then the best of luck to us both,” Tommy said. “Or to only one,” he revised. “Who knows, maybe if the one is defeated, Sabini will take his own loss in resources, clearing the way for the other.”  
  
“Hell, with circumstances like that,” Alfie laughed, “is it unromantic for me to consider sitting back and letting Sabini take care of that more pressing and impudent thorn in his side?”  
  
“No.” Tommy wondered at the queer desires of his soul to know that his soulmate would stand back and watch his death— and he found that appealing. The love of his life was an opportunistic bastard. How fitting.  
  
Alfie’s resolve weakened, and Tommy saw it. He watched the man succumb to rationale. He watched him take a double dose of it. “You’re the bloke who shot Billy Kimber, right?” Alfie stated. “You did, you fucking shot him. That’s you. You fucking betrayed him, mate.” By taking Billy Kimber’s operation for himself, Tommy announced a tainted precedent for non-familial partners. Alfie was no fool for his caution. “Why should I trust you?”  
  
“Why should I trust you?” Tommy countered. Neither man made it to where he was by being a saint. “You could stab me in the back in bed, take the lot for yourself.”  
  
“I’m insulted, Tommy.” There was far too little sincerity in his words. He thought of it already, just as Tommy had. “You know though, war... made me very, very good at sleeping with one eye open,” he said, preemptive discouragement against Tommy’s supposed attack. “And I could use that, couldn’t I, for a few more hours witness to that face of yours, eh?”  
  
Alfie wanted benefits without negotiations. He wanted Tommy without his business.  
  
“We could both have what we want,” Tommy offered, and he had no immediate qualms over satisfying that which Alfie wanted of him. “Or we can each walk away empty-handed. You want to know how a soulmate compares, if all the stories are true.” Tommy often wondered after the hyperbole of euphoric rumors. People certainly exaggerated, and soulmates certainly fell short of expectations. But he also noticed neither he nor Alfie had touched the other. They were not prepared for the answer, not yet, not even at the starting line. The desk stayed between them. “You need an ally against Sabini.” He did, though he was too stubborn to admit it. “I don’t trust you, or me, or us doing either together, business or pleasure. I think... I should walk out the door before we ruin each other and everything we’ve made.” He knew he should, and yet he did not move. Tommy waited for Alfie to take his bait and present rebuttal for cooperation, simply to be argumentative. They saw where negotiations ended, but there was a certain thrill in bickering all the way there.  
  
“No, no, no, no,” Alfie objected. “Let’s not be complete and utter fucking defeatists about this, nah.” He reclined into his chair. “No, see... All you and I have got to do, right, is have us a good quick fuck... Yeah. Get that out our systems, done.” He made a sweeping motion with his hand, clearing the initial formality. “We bite our apple, have our moment of temptation, then you and I never set foot in blessed, seductive Eden again. Bye-bye.” He waved farewell to the brief pleasures he wanted answered. “We go on and discuss business. Modern age like this with the- with the telephones and the telegrams, no reason you gotta set foot in London again and no reason I gotta go out to bum-fuck Birmingham— no offense.”  
  
“None taken.”  
  
“Yeah, so,” he proposed, “point being, after you leave here, right, ain’t no rule saying I ever gotta see that gorgeous fucking face of yours again, Tommy. And you can’t turn fool over a telegram, can you? No matter how beguiling and downright fucking erotic my particular wordage might go on to be.” He spread his mouth in a wide, shrewd smirk. “Easy peasy, innit?”  
  
Tommy considered the man and his propositions before speaking. “What is it to be then, Mr. Solomons?” he replied. “Facts and figures proceeded by flattery, poems dedicated to the blue of my eyes?” Tommy had trouble picturing business with someone joined to him through such an intimate bond. It boded ill, despite his willingness to bet on their gamble.  
  
Alfie chuckled. “Nah,” he said with a light shake of his head. “Nah, mate. Your ass, now? Yeah, I’d write letters to an ass like that. Long ones, long... fuckin’ filthy and obscene, they’d be.”  
  
“Long ones,” Tommy muttered with a smirk. He wanted to read one already.  
  
Business was not impossible, and possible business could be good together. Who better to work at his side than a man predisposed to compatibility? They walked a tightrope of gains above a pit of liabilities. Tommy always had been a risk-taker.  
  
They could work together, captain and sergeant major, a fellow soldier on the brink of allied war.  
  
“But all of this, all...” Alfie stared at him, seeing Tommy down to his intertwined soul. “Whatever agreement we do unto us create moving forward, if there so be one, it don’t fucking touch the larger implications at work here.”  
  
Tommy held out his cigarette and the mound of ash at its end. Alfie pushed an ashtray towards him, and Tommy tapped his spent paper and tobacco into it. “No,” he said. “No, it doesn’t.”  
  
For a moment, there was nothing. Alfie stared at him with a crazed glare full of naked ire. Tommy rebutted with a calm, unblinking glance.  
  
They were soulmates, destined for love, be it platonic or romantic.  
  
They hated each other. They hated what their fated meeting stole.  
  
Tommy took a deep, contemplative breath. For the first time in many years, he was forced to his knees before the great might of uncertainty. There were no more guarantees. Nothing was promised.  
  
“We could die tomorrow.”  
  
Alfie laughed. “Fuck that,” he scoffed. “We could die today.” In a flash, there was a gun in his hand, aimed right between Tommy’s eyes. “You could die today. I...” Alfie took a deep, steadying breath. “I want... you... to die today, ‘fore you step foot out me bakery.” Tommy did not bat an eyelash at the gun trained on him. It would take a strong man to kill his own soulmate. His was no weakling. “You know how they say,” Alfie muttered, “‘Nothin’ personal’? ‘Ah, yeah, it’s nothin’ personal, but uh, I’m gonna kill you now.’ You know how the sentiment goes.” Tommy nodded. A good many deaths he dealt or ordered were impersonal. In the war, it was the war. In business, it was business, reputation. People had to die, and most times, it was nothing personal. “Right, well, this right here,” Alfie said, “‘tween you and me, yeah, it’s nothing but personal.”  
  
Tommy understood the mentality and identified with it. “Yes.”  
  
“Weakness,” Alfie stated. “I’m yours, you’re mine. You ain’t wrong ‘bout that.” He cocked back the hammer of his gun. “And, see... I’d rather get rid of mine ‘fore you see fit to get rid of yours. That makes sense, right?” Earnestly, he asked a question to which he already knew the answer.  
  
“Plenty,” Tommy assured. He had not decided if he would be better off with Alfie dead or not. Tommy had great enough weakness protecting his family. He did not need a soulmate on top of them. It sounded easy to kill a man he just met. Remove the concern.  
  
Easy.  
  
“Think it’ll hurt?” Alfie questioned.  
  
“Me?” Tommy replied. “Yes.” A bullet between the eyes was a quick death, but he imagined first would come that burning, breaking flash of pain. “You?” Could the emotional heart devastate and distress its physical dwelling, clawing at the walls, begging to be put from its misery? “Probably.”  
  
Alfie weighed the word and its opinion. “Probably.”  
  
“I won’t question the sense in you wanting me dead,” Tommy told him. It made plenty of sense. The world was small and England smaller. Who could predict their outlook towards one another once mutual enemies were defeated? It was without prediction. In the interest of immediate survival, however, “A union between us makes better sense yet, better business sense.” He was not wrong. ‘Soulmate’ was not a term lightly applied, nor was it one relegated solely to romance.   
  
“Union,” Alfie repeated. “Union,” he pondered. “Thing is, yeah,” he said with a sniffling inhale, “I know how you lot do business, don’ I?” He sat forward. “I know all about how you marry off boys and girls, making your unions. Your own fucking brother actually, wed off to some wild gypsy girl, in’at right?” Alfie entertained his revolver a moment longer before uncocking it to set aside. The weapon was not prepared to take on the probability of self-inflicted pain, but it was ready to be used, if necessary. “Well... Thomas, sweetie, I will not be your wild gypsy girl.”  
  
“Mr. Solomons—”  
  
“Oh, ‘Alfie,’ please,” he insisted.  
  
“Alfie,” Tommy complied, “it is my very reliable opinion that no one—” he pointed at the air for emphasis— “will be calling you a wild gypsy girl.”  
  
Alfie could not help but laugh. He shook his head with open, unashamed amusement. Tommy allowed a smile on his own face.  
  
God help them, they liked each other.  
  
“If...” Alfie paused, drawing out his reliance upon the conditional word. “If we can keep this whole _messy_  soulmate business between us— you, me, and that fucking inanimate lamp right there— maybe... possibly... we could come to a, uh, standing arrangement.” He raised his eyebrows and tilted his head. “Or a lying down arrangement, dependent on your particular preference and how far it is willing to _stretch_.”  
  
Tommy was not opposed to mutual secrecy. The fewer people who knew Tommy Shelby had a soulmate to leverage against him— especially one so far away and out from under his protection— the better. There was, however, issue with the proposal and amendment to it. “I will, of course, be telling my family.”  
  
“Fuck off,” Alfie objected.  
  
Tommy understood the cynicism towards entrusting others with the secret. He especially worried over Arthur’s ability to keep it private. “They are my family,” he reasoned. “They know the general due date of my clock. If they don’t inquire after it following my return, they are certain to do so in the coming weeks.” The family would want to know all about his soulmate— just as soon as one of them realized hearts’ consummation and asked.  
  
“Family,” Alfie groaned. If he had a large stock of his own, there seemed no one close enough to share the secret. “Family,” he permitted, “you can tell, of the _immediate_ variety— brothers, sister, whatnot.”  
  
“My aunt is like a mother to me,” Tommy said.  
  
Alfie sighed. “And aunts who are like mothers,” he allowed.  
  
Tommy could not imagine how Polly would take the news. She was against visiting Alfie Solomons on mere discussion of business, on taking side with him against Sabini. Now, their partnership was as good as guaranteed— and expanded into preordained infatuation. It would make for an interesting birthday present to her, no mistake.  
  
“So, are we in bed together?” Tommy established, phrasing it in the best possible way for Alfie’s humor. It got a smile.  
  
“ _You_  are going to be so very, very bad for me,” the man said with one exhaling laugh. “But all right,” he finally agreed, “we got us a deal.”  
  
Proper etiquette be damned, they did not shake on it. They did not touch. The desk stayed between them.  
  
Tommy snuffed out his cigarette. “If you’ll excuse me now, Alfie,” he made certain to call him, “I have important business to attend with my sister.”  
  
Alfie nodded his head along. “Your sister live in London?”  
  
Tommy moved to the edge of his chair, ready to stand. “Yes, as a matter of fact, she does.”  
  
“So you’ll go Alfie, sister, Birmingham, that it?”  
  
“That is the plan.”  
  
Alfie scratched at his beard and considered those intentions. “Bloody long trip to Birmingham,” he said. “Be a shame to head back so soon, wouldn’it?” He nodded in reply to his own question. “Right, so I think Tommy Shelby should go Alfie—” he put a hand to his chest— “sister—” he flicked his hand in an aimless direction— “Alfie.” He was pleasantly casual as he made demand that Tommy return before leaving the city, a demand which may or may not have been negotiable. “Then he can fuck off back to Birmingham.”  
  
The business union was assured, but Alfie still wanted a little more on his end.  
  
Tommy inhaled air and exhaled request. “My sister was attacked recently.”  
  
“All right.” Alfie waited to hear his point.  
  
“By Sabini’s men,” he said. “I had a few of my own in place to stop anything... unsavory, but after the attack, I wonder if more may be required.” Alfie waited for him to speak his need out loud. “Until such a time I can position more of my men in London, I would appreciate it if, as a personal favor, you would keep eye on the house.” It was his condition. If there were going to be an arrangement, there was no reason both could not benefit in some way.  
  
Alfie contemplated the request before making his decision. At the end of deliberation, he shrugged. “Well, she’s practically family, in’ she?” He chuckled. “Yeah, all right. Two men on the house ‘til more your own’s in place. Give us the address.” He tapped a piece of paper on his desk, and Tommy wrote Ada’s new address, knowing she would take his offered house. Alfie raised his glasses and studied the few lines like a contract. Perhaps it was. “And the other part.” He looked at Tommy beyond the spectacles and over the paper.  
  
“My schedule, you mean.”  
  
“Your schedule, I mean.”  
  
Tommy was needed back in Birmingham. His business in London was half-concluded with Alfie’s alliance and would be wholly done once he met with Ada. The current war with Sabini did not lend itself to frivolity. He met Alfie at an inconvenient time.  
  
“Did you know it is now lunch hour?” Alfie spoke. Tommy did not confirm it with his watch. The time could be ten o’ clock, but if Alfie said it was the lunch hour, his workers would take lunch. “Nobody out there,” he said, nodding at the open windows and the warehouse beyond. “Only Ollie and— oh, look at that!” He waved his hand at the vigilant man and then dismissed him with it. “Yeah. Yeah, he’s gone off to lunch now too, hungry boy.”  
  
They were alone and unwatched.  
  
Alfie sat a few seconds longer before getting up and walking around the desk. He leaned on it, facing Tommy. They stared at each other, silence prevailing before words.  
  
“I,” Alfie threatened, “am going to touch you, Tommy.”  
  
Tommy stood from his chair to look him in the eye. “Do your worst, Alfie.”  
  
It came slowly, that rough, coarse hand. Alfie reached for Tommy’s face like it was the trigger in a bear trap. He was cautious about losing the hand. He touched the right cheek to avoid Sabini’s right-handed battery on the left.   
  
He touched.  
  
Fuck.  
  
Tommy was lost to it in an instant. He was weak of strength and powerless in inhibitions. How could physical touch feel like intangible, philosophical thought? Alfie’s hand was the sense of belonging. It was communication without word. It was a job well done and the prideful knowledge no one else could have accomplished the feat. It was calm, a simple serenity without clawing nightmares. Demons took a step back out of respect for the moment.  
  
“ _Oh_ , hell,” Alfie cursed. He was in trouble. They both were.  
  
“Don’t talk.”  
  
Tommy dismissed their faltering hesitation altogether and moved forward. He pushed Alfie against the desk, but it was a solid weight of masculinity and muscle versus the healing body of an abuse victim. Alfie took a quick control Tommy could not wrestle away— not this time. He turned them and put Tommy’s back to the desk. Breath exhaled and commingled between them. There was no indecision of the kiss.  
  
It was rough, and hard, and walked a line on the good side of violence. Alfie’s beard scratched, and that was new. His hands groped without the gentleness of woman, and that was different. His skin was warm, and that was familiar. He moved in every way that every person never would before, and that was Alfie.   
  
So many years of ‘not enough,’ of clawing, fighting, taking in futile attempts to fill some descriptionless void. So many years and here was the answer, shoving him up against the desk in a London distillery. It was ridiculous. Tommy was not laughing.  
  
Nails scratched at his skin. A tongue licked at his kiss. Teeth bit at his mouth. Thin, fragile skin reopened on a recently busted lip. Their kiss flooded with the red taste of acrid metal.  
  
No woman treated him like this, and Tommy dared not turn such treatment unto them. Only now did he see the limitations tying down his past. There were no rules with his soulmate. They could go as far as they wanted because what they wanted was the same. No fear or resentment would follow.  
  
Alfie gripped Tommy by the back of his knee to lift him off the floor and seat him on the desk. The pen that stabbed into his thigh was the abrupt wakeup call Tommy needed. It was proof and remembrance of the world outside Alfie Solomons.  
  
“Mm,” he hummed into the kiss. “Mm, stop.” He put a hand to Alfie’s chest and exerted what strength he had against a man with no inclination towards movement. “Alfie,” Tommy scolded.  
  
Alfie groaned and gave up on the kiss but not proximity. He stood there between Tommy’s legs, staring into the face of his undeniable soulmate.  
  
“I really...” Tommy’s legs lacked proper strength when he slid off the desk and onto them. “I have to...”  
  
Alfie stopped him with a firm hand on the arm. From his pocket, he pulled a handkerchief, and with presumed, lingering familiarity, he touched it to Tommy’s face, wiping clean the smears of blood. There was a red brush of it on his own lip, ignored for the moment. He was preoccupied tending Tommy, erasing the blotted brutality left by their enemy. Sabini hurt them both, and now, they would hurt him— together.  
  
The soiled handkerchief was tossed onto the desk, and with his free hands, Alfie smoothed out the lines of Tommy’s pretty suit, making him semi-respectable again.  
  
“So,” he posed, “what do you say about that, hm?” If he was trying not to smirk, he failed. He knew it was good.  
  
Tommy needed another cigarette but managed composure without one. He cleared his throat. “I say,” he answered, “Alfie, sister, Alfie, Birmingham.”  
  
The response on Alfie’s face promised nothing wholesome.  
  
Tommy Shelby’s clock was spent. He was mortal man now, but he was a mortal with plans. He would live his remaining days with one foot in the grave— and make the most of every one. He was his only guarantee of tomorrow. But he had a soulmate to help him get there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> On the next episode of “As My Soulmate Stabs Me”...
> 
> Arthur: “Why the fuck did your soulmate betray us?”  
> Tommy: “Is the answer not in the question?”
> 
> Tommy’s gonna leave Alfie’s like, “Everyone is so wrapped up in their own lives, it’ll probably be awhile before they think to ask about my soulmate.” Then he goes and meets Ada on the street, and the first words out of her mouth are, “You’re not dead. So... who is she?” (Come on though. Girls would be all about their clocks and soulmates. So one who lost her countdown early and never really got to enjoy it would probably transfer that compulsion onto her family’s, especially Tommy’s.)
> 
> The dialogue for this fic turned into an odd but fun repetitious back-and-forth between Tommy and Alfie. Where they both knew what was going to happen, but they were dragging their feet in getting there. Haggling. They like the dance. And they like their soulmate. Haha. Sorry to include so much canon dialogue, but obviously some of it is necessary and inevitable.
> 
> Hope you enjoyed! Let me know if you did. ♥


End file.
